South Asia

Founded
1964

Seminar Number
477

The University Seminar on South Asia seeks to broaden and deepen understanding about the region of South Asia by providing a forum to discuss ongoing research as well as special topics related to the complex and multiple societies of South Asia both past and present. Drawing together scholars from many different disciplines, the seminar fosters cross-disciplinary discussion and perspectives on a broad range of questions and concerns. In recent years, the seminar has deliberated on such issues as: religion and politics, the political function of violence in South Asia, national integration, language and community, South Asian identities in pre-colonial times, religious iconography, and many other topics. The University Seminar on South Asia is a merger of the University Seminar on Tradition and Change in South and Southeast Asia (founded in 1964) and the University Seminar on Indology (founded in 1993).

Meetings

Abstract

This talk focuses on the role of Rabindranath Tagore in Bangladesh, where he is loved and championed as much as he is in India but where his meaning and cultural valence are slightly different. The composer of the national anthems of both India and Bangladesh, Tagore has come to stand, in Bangladesh, as an inspiration for a secular attitude, one based on love for the country, for its language and diversity, and for a non-sectarian view of religion. Tagore was not the first to enunciate this secular culture: cultural expressions in Bengal were by and large secularized from the beginning of the 19th century. But it was Tagore who, in his creative works of diverse genres prior to the 1947 Partition of Bengal, gave the greatest literary shape to secular Bengali culture. During the 1971 battle for independence against West Pakistan, leading up to the 1972 birth of Bangladesh, Tagore became an abiding cultural symbol of Bengali nationalism in the face of an Urdu-centric, more orthodox Muslim, Pakistani ethos. Secularism was declared as one of the abiding principles of the state in the 1972 constitution of Bangladesh, and a Tagore song was declared the national anthem. Although, after the 1975 assassination of the founding father of Bangladesh, Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the constitutional provision for secularism was dropped, cultural expressions in secular formats have never been disrupted. Here we examine the ways in which Tagore remains both an inspiration – and a stumbling block for those who would champion a different vision of Bangladesh based on Bangladeshi rather than Bengali nationalism.